Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip

which for several months he cultivated by means of the best

Genievre ever distilled from the Texel to Antwerp, and he

lulled the suspicion of the jealous turnkey by holding out

to him the flattering prospect of his designing to marry

Rosa.

Besides thus offering a bait to the ambition of the father,

he managed, at the same time, to interest his zeal as a

jailer, picturing to him in the blackest colours the learned

prisoner whom Gryphus had in his keeping, and who, as the

sham Jacob had it, was in league with Satan, to the

detriment of his Highness the Prince of Orange.

At first he had also made some way with Rosa; not, indeed,

in her affections, but inasmuch as, by talking to her of

marriage and of love, he had evaded all the suspicions which

he might otherwise have excited.

We have seen how his imprudence in following Rosa into the

garden had unmasked him in the eyes of the young damsel, and

how the instinctive fears of Cornelius had put the two

lovers on their guard against him.

The reader will remember that the first cause of uneasiness

was given to the prisoner by the rage of Jacob when Gryphus

crushed the first bulb. In that moment Boxtel’s exasperation

was the more fierce, as, though suspecting that Cornelius

possessed a second bulb, he by no means felt sure of it.

From that moment he began to dodge the steps of Rosa, not

only following her to the garden, but also to the lobbies.

Only as this time he followed her in the night, and

bare-footed, he was neither seen nor heard except once, when

Rosa thought she saw something like a shadow on the

staircase.

Her discovery, however, was made too late, as Boxtel had

heard from the mouth of the prisoner himself that a second

bulb existed.

Taken in by the stratagem of Rosa, who had feigned to put it

in the ground, and entertaining no doubt that this little

farce had been played in order to force him to betray

himself, he redoubled his precaution, and employed every

means suggested by his crafty nature to watch the others

without being watched himself.

He saw Rosa conveying a large flower-pot of white

earthenware from her father’s kitchen to her bedroom. He saw

Rosa washing in pails of water her pretty little hands,

begrimed as they were with the mould which she had handled,

to give her tulip the best soil possible.

And at last he hired, just opposite Rosa’s window, a little

attic, distant enough not to allow him to be recognized with

the naked eye, but sufficiently near to enable him, with the

help of his telescope, to watch everything that was going on

at the Loewestein in Rosa’s room, just as at Dort he had

watched the dry-room of Cornelius.

He had not been installed more than three days in his attic

before all his doubts were removed.

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Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip

From morning to sunset the flower-pot was in the window,

and, like those charming female figures of Mieris and

Metzys, Rosa appeared at that window as in a frame, formed

by the first budding sprays of the wild vine and the

honeysuckle encircling her window.

Rosa watched the flower-pot with an interest which betrayed

to Boxtel the real value of the object enclosed in it.

This object could not be anything else but the second bulb,

that is to say, the quintessence of all the hopes of the

prisoner.

When the nights threatened to be too cold, Rosa took in the

flower-pot.

Well, it was then quite evident she was following the

instructions of Cornelius, who was afraid of the bulb being

killed by frost.

When the sun became too hot, Rosa likewise took in the pot

from eleven in the morning until two in the afternoon.

Another proof: Cornelius was afraid lest the soil should

become too dry.

But when the first leaves peeped out of the earth Boxtel was

fully convinced; and his telescope left him no longer in any

uncertainty before they had grown one inch in height.

Cornelius possessed two bulbs, and the second was intrusted